Popping Balloons & Validating Ideas Lunch Talk with Jesse Lawrence

The idea of popping balloons is to metaphorically throw darts at ideas based on reasons why the ideas won't make it in the marketplace (testing problem-market fit). Good solutions pop with effort, bad solutions pop easily, and the best solutions are hard to pop. Jesse has built and refined a system of ideating and validating scalable concepts. He will share his theory and methods on how to get to the best ideas.

Jesse founded Boulder Bits - Colorado's Startup Studio - to build companies and work with entrepreneurs.

Jesse's Bio: At Boulder Bits, I identify and validate untapped business opportunities. Then I build teams around the best opportunities. When a team aligns with each other and the scalable solution, I form and fund the company and support the team. While vetting opportunities takes a lot of time and effort, the most important feature is vetting team. I spend much of my time seeking new co-founders and working with recent portfolio companies. The following are a few sectors we’re investing in: Video Technology, e-Commerce, Life Hacks, Embedded Systems, Human Safety & Wearable Devices.Interesting Tidbits: I spent 5 months in Antarctica over a three year period doing some pretty amazing science. Yes, it is cold there, especially when you live in a tent. My fourth-grade teacher nearly flunked me, yet I became a professor at Stanford. Go figure! I spent 15 years as an earthquake seismologist innovating new signal processing techniques, studying the Earth's interior, and creating a highly successful social-cyber-seismic network called the Quake-Catcher Network.